I'm a research engineer at Mozilla working on the Rust compiler. I have history with Firefox layout and graphics, and programming language theory and type systems (mostly of the OO, Featherweight flavour, thus the title of the blog). http://www.ncameron.org @nick_r_cameron

Monday, July 16, 2012

Mask layers on the basic backend

Using mask layers on the basic backend is a bit different from the GPU backends because we don't use shaders, and instead must do a bit of a dance with Cairo. Also, the transforms are different in basic layers vs. the GPU layers (relative to user space, rather than relative to the layer's container), which means we must handle the layer transform differently.

When using basic layers, the drawing is done using Cairo, or more precisely, using Thebes our wrapper graphics library. Therefore, we do not (as on the GPU backends) use shaders to do the masking, but resort to actual mask operations. The basic idea is we draw the content un-masked, use that as a source, use the mask layer as the mask, and just paint the source through the mask. Of course it gets more complicated, because sometimes the source layers use paint, and sometimes fill. Furthermore, if the source layer has an opacity, then we must do a push/pop group because there is no mask with opacity operation in Cairo. In this case, we push the current drawing context, do the paint or fill, then use this new context for the masking source.

Thebes layers are more complex because they use a rotating buffer for drawing to minimise redrawing. Masking is not affected too much though, for each quadrant we just mask as if we were drawing the whole layer, using the mask's transform and ignoring any rotation. The only slight complication is that the mask and its transform must be extracted from the source layer in the basic layers code, and passed to the buffer separately.

The transforms in basic layers work differently to the other backends. In layout, we set up the mask transform the same way, but we use a different method of calculating the effective transform. The actual computation for mask layer transforms is the same, but the matrix passed to ComputeEffectiveTransformForMaskLayer will be different. When we come to rendering, we use only the mask layer's transform for when using the mask, that is, we use SetMatrix, we don't add the mask's transform to the current transform like we do on the GPU backends.

The basic layers backend is always used on the drawing thread when we use OMTC (either the OpenGL or basic backends will be used for compositing). Masking is mostly done on the compositing thread. IPDL does most of the heavy lifting for this, the only thing we have to do is to ensure that if we are only drawing (that is, not also compositing), then we must 'draw' the mask to an off-screen buffer so that it can be used by the compositing thread. Masking is only done if we are compositing also, so when we draw a layer, we check whether to draw it with the mask (if we are compositing) or draw it and its mask separately (if we are only drawing). Of course there is an exception, colour layers are masked on the drawing thread.